WebLogic with Docker in the Cloud

Docker has been without any doubt the most hyped technology this summer. Apart from incrementally and quickly creating light-weight containers that can be hooked up together it seems to become the de-facto standard for spinning up instances locally and in the cloud. In the past there was no real compatibility between cloud providers on an OS/instance-level and also import/export features were “demanding” at best.

Linux containers for clean sandboxing do exist since much longer, e.g. Google is starting over 2 billion Linux containers every week. With Docker there is an open source based de-facto standard now that customers want to use (honestly, few people looked into lxc and kernel namespaces before Docker had it’s appearance)

Docker and WebLogic?

Oracle WebLogic Server currently does notofficially support WebLogic running Docker, yet there is a github project to start with created by Bruno Borges. This project contains the Dockerfile with all necessary WLST-scripts to create a Docker container running WebLogic.

You can run Docker itself in Oracle Enterprise Linux like in most other Linux distributions such as CentOS, Ubuntu etc. Docker containers always run Linux; e.g. you could have WebLogic running on Ubuntu in a Docker container which is running on CentOS.

Docker Hub Registry

The Docker hub registry is best known as a public registry for Docker images to start with but it can be used to store private images as well.

The Docker Registry contains base Docker images for Java, Ubuntu etc., yet there are no official images from Oracle at the moment. Let’s hope that Oracle will not repeat the rather sad story of poor support for Oracle product AMIs for Amazon Cloud.

Public Clouds can either deploy Docker containers directly from github by creating a container on the fly based on a Dockerfile on github, or by accessing an Docker image stored in the Docker registry. I will demonstrate below how to deploy WebLogic as Docker container straight from the Docker registry.

Clouds: Amazon, Google, …

Amazon Beanstalk, same as the Google Cloud, support Docker containers as well! So you can dockerize your application (including WebLogic) and run the same Docker image on the cloud. To the best of my knowledge there is currently no information available if Oracle has plans to support Docker in the Oracle cloud.

HowTo Run Your WebLogic in a Docker Container on Amazon Beanstalk

The following web cast gives a brief overview of the steps involved. It’s not intended as a A-Z tutorial, rather a quick recording to illustrate the point saving you from dozens of boring screen shots. I am using CentOS 7 to run Docker and create the local Docker container.

The following steps are shown:

Create a running Docker container with WebLogic

Create a new image based on the container

Upload the image to Docker hub

Create the Amazon Beanstalk JSON file for running a Docker container

Create an AWS Beanstalk environment that runs the image from Docker hub

Oracle supports the licensing of certain AWS/EC2 instances, also different versions of Oracle Database are available at the Amazon cloud, so ask your Oracle sales rep about the licensing with Docker and Beanstalk.

Enjoy!

Update

I just learned that this posting with the web cast made into the Docker Weekly. Cool, thanks!

Update 2

Soon there will be Microsoft in the boat as well. So Amazon, Google and Microsoft amongst others will support Docker containers. I am curious to see what this will mean for Oracle’s own cloud offering.

thanks for your feedback! Cosmetics are important as they make world more beautiful – good to have shorter product names. Also thanks for pointing out that there is an OL docker image now, that is good news indeed.

In an hypothetical situation like a crashed dockerized weblogic instance running in a private cloud of an organization would be supported by Oracle? I mean, they would answer a service request opened in the Oracle Support?

in the posting it says that WebLogic under Docker is not officially supported.
To the best of my knowledge this hasn’t changed yet.
All I can tell you is that Oracle is aware that customers are very interested in this!
I was talking about it at OOW 2014 🙂

thanks for your question!
kind regards,

Frank

P.S. My personal opinion: If Oracle might accept Docker one day as a supported “platform” for WebLogic IMHO support would deal with WebLogic issues for such an an environment (instead of asking you to replicate your scenario on a supported environment). I wouldn’t expect they’d fix Docker issues though.

Trackbacks

[…] Security and Performance. Thanks to the community for all the excellent WebLogic articles about WebLogic with Docker & How to check for SSL POODLE / SSLv3 bug on WebLogic? How to fix & Getting Started with […]

[…] Public Clouds can either deploy Docker containers directly from github by creating a container on the fly based on a Dockerfile on github, or by accessing an Docker image stored in the Docker registry. I will demonstrate below how to deploy WebLogic as Docker container straight from the Docker registry. Read the complete article here. […]

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